food, kith/kin: My sister served this last year … when I heard about it I acted like a 5-year old … i.e. YUCK … but it is very good and I think I will serve it tonight!

Watermelon and tomato are two fruits that complement each another in an unusual way. When you cut up and combine them, their distinctions become a little blurry and each masquerades as the other. The tomato’s acidity becomes tamed, as does the melon’s sweetness; their juices mingle, and even their flesh seems to meld.

gLee, tv, Rebecca Black’s “Friday”, pop culture: Last night’s episode didn’t work too well for me … but I find it interesting how ” Rebecca Black’s inane, idiotic autotuned song ‘Friday'” is making its way through pop culture.

That bit of lyric from Rebecca Black’s inane, idiotic autotuned song “Friday” got a treatment so … darn good and infectious that you just have to tip your hat to Artie, Sam and Puck for starting prom night jumpin’. They lit up the crowd, simultaneously mocking and honoring the vapidness of a YouTube pop anthem. Artie’s rap made it more legit.

fashion, Kate Middleton: I am not a huge fashion person … I have my uniform … but I like this column where they tell you where to find a celebrity’s outfit …

Where did Kate Middleton go for her first public appearance since Wedding Weekend? Grocery shopping! The newlywed grabbed some necessities at her local Waitrose supermarket in Anglesey, Wales last week, where she topped off her skinny black jeans and white sweater with acozy cashmere shawl by knitwear brand Minnie Rose, People reports. Similar styles by the designer are available at Saks Fifth Avenue for $280 and The Girls Room for $298. The new Duchess of Cambridge also trotted to the store in a pair of brown patent crocodile ballet flats by British footwear company London Sole. The $165 “Pirouette” shoes feature fabric lining and working drawstrings, and are currently in stock atLondonSole.com

TWO massive pieces of news from the giddy world of in-flight entertainment. Firstly, passengers flying with American Airlines (AA) may soon be able to stream films and TV shows from an in-flight library direct to their own Wi-Fi-enabled media players. Rather than watch on the sometimes rather poky players embedded in the seat in front, they can enjoy “The Fast and the Furious” on the larger screens of their laptops and iPads. AA is testing the technology on two planes, but it could be rolled out across more flights in the autumn if the Federal Aviation Administration is happy.

Elsewhere in the sky, Singapore Airlines has launched its new e-Magazine. Twenty publications, including Bloomberg Businessweek and Elle, have been made available for perusal via the in-flight entertainment systems on the carrier’s Airbus A380 and Boeing 777-300ER services. This roll-out follows a successful trial with three of Singapore Airlines’ in-house magazines. The future plan is to serve even more magazines on more flights.

high school, superlatives, questions: Were you most likely to succeed? What do you think? Any long-term impact?

Schools Shunning Senior Polls

An estimated 1 in 4 high-school senior classes this month are conducting the ritual pre-graduation vote to choose one or two members “most likely to succeed.” But the trend may not last much longer.

Schools are veering away from senior-class “superlatives” polls. Kelly Furnas, executive director of the Journalism Education Association at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., estimates that about 25% of high-school yearbooks still name one or more students “most likely to succeed,” down from about 75% two decades ago. One reason, says Mike Hiestand, an attorney in Ferndale, Wash., and legal consultant to the nonprofit Student Press Law Center, Arlington, Va., is that some labels, such as “worst reputation” or “most likely to have a conversation with himself,” can raise legal concerns about damaging students’ future prospects.

iPhone, Apps: I already have this App … now I know something to do with it.

Google’s “Goggles” app does many things, all of which revolve around using your phone to take a picture of something. Google then analyzes that picture using dark magic known as image recognition and returns relevant information to you. Take a photo of a famous piece of artwork, for instance, and you’ll get information about its artist, its value and so on.

One of the more useful features is Goggles’ ability to capture images of business cards and, with the latest version of the Android app, parse the relevant information from a particular card and add it under the appropriate headings of a new contact entry.

And then it was time, the moment I had been dreading for more than a decade. If you are squeamish, prepare yourself, because I am going to tell you, in explicit detail, exactly what it was like.

I have no idea. Really. I slept through it. One moment, Abba was shrieking “Dancing Queen! Feel the beat from the tambourine . . .”

. . . and the next moment, I was back in the other room, waking up in a very mellow mood. Andy was looking down at me and asking me how I felt. I felt excellent. I felt even more excellent when Andy told me that it was all over, and that my colon had passed with flying colors. I have never been prouder of an internal organ.

But my point is this: In addition to being a pathetic medical weenie, I was a complete moron. For more than a decade I avoided getting a procedure that was, essentially, nothing. There was no pain and, except for the MoviPrep, no discomfort. I was risking my life for nothing.

natural disasters, flooding, history, lists: None of the historical floods impacted my areas …. but interesting to think about what you remember of the ones in your lifetime.

In light of the current flooding of the Mississippi River, TIME’s Kayla Webley spoke to Robert Holmes, a flood expert with the U.S. Geological Survey, about some of the largest floods in America’s history

He was the embodiment of pure intellect, the bumbling professor with the German accent, a comic cliche in a thousand films. Instantly recognizable, like Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, Albert Einstein’s shaggy-haired visage was as familiar to ordinary people as to the matrons who fluttered about him in salons from Berlin to Hollywood. Yet he was unfathomably profound–the genius among geniuses who discovered, merely by thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed.

…

World War II, Einstein became even more outspoken. Besides campaigning for a ban on nuclear weaponry, he denounced McCarthyism and pleaded for an end to bigotry and racism. Coming as they did at the height of the cold war, the haloed professor’s pronouncements seemed well meaning if naive; Life magazine listed Einstein as one of this country’s 50 prominent “dupes and fellow travelers.” Says Cassidy: “He had a straight moral sense that others could not always see, even other moral people.” Harvard physicist and historian Gerald Holton adds, “If Einstein’s ideas are really naive, the world is really in pretty bad shape.” Rather it seems to him that Einstein’s humane and democratic instincts are “an ideal political model for the 21st century,” embodying the very best of this century as well as our highest hopes for the next. What more could we ask of a man to personify the past 100 years?

It was the Mayans — or maybe the Romans or the Greeks or the Sumerians — who called the shot this time, evidently on a day Nostradamus phoned in sick. Apparently, a rogue planet named Nibiru (which frankly sounds more like a new Honda than a new world) is headed our way, with a cosmic crack-up set for next year. No matter who’s behind the current prediction, there are enough people ready to spread and believe in this kind of end-of-the-world hooey that you have to wonder if the earth isn’t starting to take things personally.

Regrettably, the Nibiru yarn got a boost in recent days with the very real announcement that an alignment of several of the very real planets will be taking place this month, offering a fleeting treat for stargazers willing to get up before sunrise and take a look. Even this genuine cosmic phenomenon, however, may be a bit less than it appears.

Beginning today and lasting for a few weeks, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Mars will be visible in the early morning sky, aligned roughly along the ecliptic — or the path the sun travels throughout the day. Uranus and Neptune, much fainter but there all the same, should be visible through binoculars. What gives the end-of-the-worlders shivers is that just such a configuration is supposed to occur on Dec. 21, 2012, and contribute in some unspecified way to the demolition of the planet. But what makes that especially nonsensical — apart from the fact that it’s, you know, nonsense — is that astronomers say no remotely similar alignment will occur next year.